In celebration of World Teacher Day

 WTD JDI WILTY 

It is exam season, but this collection of letters is not a mnemonic for remembering first letters of quotes from a Shakespearean play or microscopic parts of a cell. They stand for the day celebrated around the globe yesterday and the title of this commentary (a shoe brand tagline and a UK celebrity game show).

World Teacher’s Day - Just Do It - Would I Lie To You?

The job has received a lot of negative shtick in the media over the last few years, I’ve added my pinch of pepper to the pot too. (See the postscript for a big grind!) But although the difficulties are real, there is still so much that is good about the profession. To celebrate world teaching day I thought I’d share a few.

The continuous cycle of growth is amazing. It is exciting to pick a vegetable or a flower that you have grown but seeing people grow in skills and understanding is miraculous.

Working with people who are all heading for the same goals, who are intelligent, funny and caring is a privilege. Staff rooms are full of problem solving, venting, creating, celebrating and hope – this is a recipe for fulfillment and fun.

Variety and surprise is guaranteed. In what other job can you use your analytical, synthetic and evaluating intelligence alongside artistic endeavours, game making, music and sport every day. What other job offers the challenge of pivoting to facilitate and leaping to take advantage of unforeseen opportunities every hour? You get to dress up in weird ways and make a fool of yourself in the name of engaging interest.

You know you have an impact on your society. Most of the kids in your class develop the skills, attitudes and care for community that keeps the country growing and sustains the privilege of democracy and freedom that we have. In what other job do you get customers coming back years later to thank you for what you did for them. In what other job do you get to influence and inspire our future scientists, writers, inventors and decision makers?

Personal growth and learning is ongoing and guaranteed. Teachers never get the chance to get set in their ways. Constant research leading to improvement in methodology is available. New resources and ideas keep you on your toes. New children every year means that nothing is every exactly the same or repeated. There is no room for boredom.

Oh the stories you hear! When I was teaching in the primary space I heard many teachers say to parents – If you promise to only believe half of what your kid comes home with I’ll only believe half of what they tell me. 

Here are some highlights in my career. There are many others I can’t share as they are as awful as they are funny.

• A Kindy kid turning up with her birth certificate to show and tell her classmates that the guy she calls daddy isn’t her birth father.  
• The Yr8 boy who told of his intellectually disabled sister escaping home, running to the supermarket, filling a trolley with all her favourite junk food and getting it home without anyone stopping her. 
• Another Yr8 boy who shared in homeroom how he had tried to use his ICT elective skills on his parent’s brand new Tesla and accidentally reprogrammed it not to start as a reason for being late to school – it took a tow truck, 2 weeks back at the dealer and a big lump sum to undo his genius. 

And you get at least a week in every ten where you can work in your pyjamas, you’re always free for Christmas and your after 4pm working hours are flexible.

Why there aren’t more people lining up to just do it – I don’t know.

 

Musicals are exhausting but so much fun.

Post Script – Long Rant – please ignore if not interested!

So what has made so many experienced teachers leave the profession and young teachers unable to stick it out; leaving schools around the world in a staffing crisis?

Here are the big four reasons that I think have made the job too hard, unrewarding and sometimes dangerous.

1.     Workload

Excessive data collection, compliance and performance transparency (ie. write down everything that will or could occur in any interaction with any student at any time) had quadrupled work load. This has been addressed to an extent in NSW and changes have been positive.

The change from hard copy teacher diaries to online learning management systems has added hours of work every week. These portals ‘open the school gates to student learning’. Everything must be perfect, on time and accessible. This means that all the normal planning and performance processes are still required (rightly so) but added to this are scripted explanations, resources, evaluations and assessments of a publishable quality shared with students and parents in a timely manner. This has forced many great teachers back to text books because the really good learning activities and experiences are organic – to meet needs as they arise, flexible and creative. This does not translate to the monster AI control that has straight jacketed teaching. And now management are screaming for learning to be more engaging. For many the hours of prep and resource development are then doubled by having to write up everything in parent speak. Just do it – and trust that teachers are professional and know what they’re doing.

 

2.     Parenting Engagement

Parenting skills that distract with screens, excuse unkind or aggressive behaviour, aim for friendship rather than guidance and even lie for their children to help them dodge the consequences of their choices have created a generation of children who are anxious because they don’t have safe boundaries, get incredibly stressed if their impulses are redirected and do not have any sense of self direction or responsibility let alone commitment to community. These are huge skills to teach but they must be mastered before successful focus on the literacy and numeracy that the curriculum demands. The lack of engagement and empowerment of children as a result of helicopter, lawn mover and delusional parenting is a major hurdle in their development of self discipline, resilience and GRIT.

Making the child believe the absurd images many parents have in their head of what they want their child to be is so cruel when reality catches up with them in high school. Parents can no longer pretend their kids are A graders by doing their kid’s homework, keeping them away from school on days they know there are assessments and complaining about unfair treatment or poor teaching from their primary school teachers. The years of lack of application and practice leave their kids wallowing in grades well below their potential with no personal skills to change it. This has created a large group of kids at school that feel like failures, don’t like it and lash out.

With the rise in learning delays and high percentages of neurologically diverse children in our classrooms, we have parents refusing to get assessments (long wait – huge cost) to enable teachers to get access to funding(hard to get and never enough) personalise learning effectively or have guidance for best practice in behaviour management.  Other parents can’t accept that in a classroom the rights of their child do not take precedence over the rights of every other learner. Very few schools have funds to employ teacher assistants which means whole classes of kids wait (loose the thread of their learning, get distracted, act out) as the teacher calms the child throwing the chair, ripping up their book, spitting, screaming on the floor, needing one to one eye contact to engage, who is upset because someone touched them... Very few schools have enough counsellors or space for withdrawal to calm down in a safe environment before they join the class again. Very few schools have access to the vast array of speech pathologists, psychologists, occupational therapists and other ists that could change lives if regular and routine access was affordable and available.

 

3.     Government Stuff Ups

Two of the worst things that has made high schools dangerous places to be in many areas were government decisions that went against the advice of their education departments. First requiring all students to remain at school until they are 17 years old and second dropping the School Certificate qualification. They then went on to strip the TAFE colleges of staff, space and resources so that those vocational curriculums have become less accessible. At the same time, the demands of Standard English and Mathematics have increased and the theoretical (cheaper to do) proportion of the vocational HSC subjects have increased; leaving kids who should be doing what their abilities and interests dictate are stuck in fruitless and soul damning academic pursuits. This constant whittling away at their self esteem (you try working your hardest yet still fail for a few years with your peers knowing every result) leads to the disruptive and antisocial behaviour that we see in the news today. If we went back to a system where a pass in the School Cert was your ticket out to a job or an apprenticeship or a practical course at TAFE that would lead directly into the trades we wouldn’t be experiencing the ‘skills shortage’ and thousands of kids leaving Uni with useless or unfinished degrees and huge Hecs debts. AND classrooms would be filled with kids in Stage 6 that were there because they wanted to be – 80% of interruptive and attention seeking behaviour wiped out right there. If the kids who struggle academically (this number is growing) had a short term and possible goal (2 more years at school seems like eternity when every day is exhausting and unrewarding) they would be more likely to engage and change their skill set.

I’m not even going to start on NAPLAN. (Improvements have been made!)

 

4.     Incompetence

The amount of awful behaviour towards children is a very low percentage in the profession but there are still adults who have no respect for others and choose to abuse those in their care. This makes every teacher the subject of suspicion for those that do abuse are clever and quiet and their victims are convinced that it is their fault or are so shamed they can’t speak up. This emotional incompetence has made many young men choose not to teach, has put so much pressure on teachers not to discipline, not to comfort that the job can’t be done. Unfounded accusations by disgruntled students are so hard to disprove and the dirt sticks. Damn every predator for the damage to trust they have done beyond the terrible theft of childhood and innocence they have committed.

Teachers work as a team. If one can’t or won’t hold the line on behaviour and values. If one can’t or won’t design learning to engage and inspire. If one can’t or won’t engage in extracurricular activities and add value to the rich tapestry of the school community – others have to pick up the slack. This is so much harder than just doing the right thing yourself. The tightrope of maintaining collegial relationships and harmony in the staff room and conveying expectations is a tricky balancing act. Having to do the work of others so that their classes don’t miss out becomes a cancer of resentment over time.

The other side of this is the feelings of a teacher who doesn’t have the natural instincts for the job; the layered, complicated web of teaching is so difficult for them. Whether this is because their training or ability is inadequate, the feeling of failure is the same. Kids can smell incompetence and enjoy the freedom from exertion it gives them or resent missed opportunities.

 

As usual the solutions to these problems all require cash.  As long as education does not make a profit, can’t be used as a tax haven or is belittled by those who wouldn’t be financially successful without their years at school; the problems will remain. In a country resistant to using recourses to make sure the future has a livable climate, to stopping the daily extinction of native flora and fauna, to listening to our tiny indigenous population, how does education stand a chance?

A little Advice from your Elder

 Welcome to my home; never forget that little pronoun. I may be 7 times your age and unable to jump over the barrier to your room, and your dinner, as once I would have. It is strange that my muscles have withered by the same mass that something under my ribs has grown, it hangs low and skews my balance and makes me so tired. But I still see what you are doing, and if you outlast me, there are some things you need to know.

To begin, the stairs.

She needs to be able to see you at all times. If she trips and falls our food source will be gone. Do not walk beside her and suddenly turn across her path when she is carrying the basket full of their outer layers. You were lucky all you got was some shouty words. I have to say going and licking her face when she was rubbing her wrenched shoulder was a good move.

Always travel behind or before, never suddenly stop at the bottom to set her spinning across the floor as she tries to miss standing on you.

To continue, the bathroom.

It is perfectly fine to push in when there is a gap and stand in companionable silence when she sits to relieve herself. I have to say I was shocked to see you jump up on her lap to do your very obvious sniffings. A polite whiff as she stands to flush is quite enough. Think yourself lucky, young man that you just got pushed off and not out, that day.

When she retires to the room and removes her outer layer she is alright. You do not need to rush in to inspect the cubicle of rain. Please politely remain in the sleeping room until she is ready to come out for her new outer layer. By the way – glass – yes you can see things through it but you can’t touch them. No matter how many times you bat and paw away at the water drops down the cubicle wall you will not save her from them.

When she gets out please stop doing that side scraping thing against her legs, your fluff sticks to her, gets scraped off onto the drying sheet then into her hair if she has done the bubbles. You must not irritate the food maker. You have to keep her relaxed, if she gets edgy and late she may forget the first meal.

Jumping up onto the top where the water spurts and sniffing into her mouth as she has that minty machine whirring in there is gob smackingly – well just weird. See earlier comment re first meal of the day.

You need to understand that this bathroom thing she does needs to be fast. Swinging on the cord of the hot air shouter and unplugging it all the time is not helping. 

It was your own fault that you got locked in the cupboard. Use your voice man.

To end – for now, the desk.

You will notice that I have a comfortable, designated area in which to repose as she stares at the wall of light and taps on the buttons that change the light. It is extremely rude to put yourself in that space. Find somewhere comfortable to wait.

You must not walk on the buttons. She was very cross yesterday when words were sent too early to her Team somewhere because you walked on the go button.

Walking around the screen to get to the window is inefficient. With your young springy legs you can just get to the viewing platform from the chair, why do you need to walk over her wrists and push your back and tail up into her face so she can’t see the light wall? Remember – the longer she stays here the longer we wait for her to go to the food room.

AND that is not a real mouse you silly boy. Do not pat it to the floor and chase it around the room. Leaving it under the table when she was making her drink hotter was a big time waster.

Getting your head stuck in her cup and panicking was a big mistake. Smashed cup and water stuff all over the buttons was the biggest boo-boo so far.

I know that your generation is more demanding and curious than mine but things will be a lot easier for you if you take my advice and wait for what you want. It will come.

Our peoples will not forget us.

Charlie in his stink sack ready to protect his space from Basileus, new kid on the block.

 

The things we hear

 When contemplating time travel, I have wondered how hard it would be to adjust to the sounds in a time long ago. So much of my lived experience would be missing, The hum of electricity flowing, the grinding of the computer fans, rumbling trucks on distant motorways. AI announcing, ‘Ok, turning on two lights’ at an indecent volume when you ask for a kitchen lamp to illume a dark morning. A human would understand that it was the tiny, high pitched chatter of fairy-wrens that woke you and would know to whisper instead of a proudly shouting. Why does it announce its intentions at all? I feel compelled to applaud and when I say thank you, it tells me it is ‘honoured to serve’. The 6am groan and grind of the coffee machine getting into heat costs seconds off my life every day. So loud! Rudely pushing itself forward through the gentle tapping of the keyboard and snuffling of the dog curled at my feet in the morning quiet.

A fairy wren male in front of an Aus wild iris.

Perhaps people in times past complained of the owls and the pussycats – wishing them off in their pea green boats. I think though they would have been able to hear much smaller things, the humphing of worms pulling their long digestive tract through the dirt below their bed mats or a funnel web pouncing on a lumbering cockroach. Maybe the first noise to bring them from their N2 sleep were the stomata of the trees around them swapping from intaking oxygen in the night to carbon dioxide as the first fingers of light flow over the horizon. Can’t you just hear some hunter gatherer chastising their kids, “No don’t set up the tent under the gumtree, they have such noisy stomata, look there’s a dropping sheoak over there, so much quieter in the morning.” The kids would mutter about dropbears and widow makers and how ridiculously cautious their old fashioned parents were. 

Left - Eucalyptus         Right - Drooping Sheoak

Dogs hear frequencies of sound that humans can’t. Charlie, our mini foxie, has his ear pricked and starts doing his bendy – woo hoo someone I know is coming dance, as soon as Nana’s shiny red mazda turns onto our street. He’s whining at the door then diving to the window and back, way before she pulls up out front. Now of course google announces when our phone is within a km so he lounges over to the guard ottoman at the front window with a selection of toys to present us with.

We were in Canterbury for Christmas in 2011 when marine tremors gave Christchurch another big shake on December 23^rd with after shocks rumbling through January. One night I woke up to what I thought was an ear piercing, high pitched scream. It went on long enough for me to sit up and begin to try and think what it was and if the daughters in the room next door were in danger. Then a big shake jolted me to my feet and the rest of the family awake and diving for a right angle in the room for protection. (All earthquake and bomb drills through my primary years were debunked – little protection under objects and doorframes!) One night when M’s soring had sent me to the couch, I woke up mid air. A quake had hit, flinging me off the leather high enough for me to wake and put out my hands and draw my knees up to land in a crawling position. This time a low sigh and an aurora type green light pummelled the senses. Hearing the Earth move is something I hope not to experience again.

Of course the noisiest creatures on the planet are us humans. At the moment in Australia there is a lot of noise around the referendum, a simple idea that has been barraged with bombs of ridiculous from the far right saying that this 3% of our population will take control, from the leader of the opposition with alternative topics, racial divide and recently auditing his own party for their financial management of past indigenous spending. We’ve had marches with rowdy placards and big celebrity or political voices shouted from the mastheads. Check out a video that has gone big from a couple of comedians and a senator on TikTok here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SAqIypjk-5A So much noise and a lot of disrespectful, condescending  behaviour. The fears that the nastiness towards the LGBTQIA community in the lead up to the Marriage Equality survey in 2017 would be replicated towards this referendum’s minority group have been realised with indigenous representatives from both sides of the debate being targeted and awful stereotypes penned in cartoons and slurs in talk back radio.

I like the early mornings when all I hear are the little things.

Check this out re early morning fairy wrens! https://www.theguardian.com/environment/commentisfree/2019/nov/14/why-im-voting-no-1-superb-fairy-wren-and-you-should-too The vote for Australia’s favourite bird is becoming very serious!